This all reminds me this "The Mitchell and Webb Situation - Farming" sketch :)
Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
691–700 of 879 posts
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them." Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.
Not to mention, raising meat chickens is sad. We've bread them to gorge themselves so they bulk up fast. That results in essentially morbidly obese chickens. We ended up with two on accident and they couldn't even climb the ramp into the coop after a few weeks. The just gorged and sat around in the dirt. It was very sad. Raising non-meat chickens takes a lot longer and the meat output is much lower.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed). If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based,…
Less termination of life based on numbers or some version of (sentience * number of individuals)? I find it hard to believe the sheer number of individual insects killed during harvest could match the killing of one cow, calorie for calorie. Also, what if we increase the calories of the animal we choose to slaughter, say we start raising massive whale-sized animals instead, would that tip the scales?
It takes 20 to 40 plant calories to raise one calorie of beef. So slaughtering a cow kills 20 to 40 times the number of lives as eating plants directly.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#695Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#696The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemics, which also means that this is the least indicated time to get a backyard chicken. The US should have dropped battery caging, like the rest of the world did 15 years ago.
California, which dropped battery caging years ago, has been on of the states most hard hit. The real reason is that the US doesn't vaccinate it's chickens, which it mostly doesn't do because if it did, it couldn't export to several countries.
Can you tell more ? Why does vaccination prevents export ?
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as - a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]” - and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process. Few are the vegans that…
There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.
(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#698I genuinely don't understand why the focus is on egg prices. Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs? And no, even to the absolutely poorest among us, that's not a meaningful amount. Yes, egg prices, as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an absolute value? I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46. That isn't, by any measurement, a lot of money more than I would have p…
TBH I haven't even noticed a price increase here in Brooklyn. I did notice that a lot of the "oh no eggs are running out" hysteria lined right up with some incoming winter storms, which typically drives up demand for basics like eggs, milk, and bread in the days before. Empty shelves for these items is incredibly common before snow. I don't doubt that there are places gouging, especially in Manhattan, but I just don'…
The price increases in Brooklyn have been huge.
And the eggs haven't been selling out before winter storms -- there haven't been any serious storms that anybody has "prepared" for, just regular snow. There's been absolutely no increase in price for milk or bread or anything else.
This is entirely because of bird flu, it's supply and demand, it's not price gouging.
I don't know why you're trying to convince yourself that the empty shelves at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are due to winter storms, or why you haven't noticed that eggs are $9 at your local bodega. Trader Joe's in Brooklyn even has signs explaining that the empty shelves are because of shortages from suppliers.
Again -- it's bird flu, pure and simple.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#699Feed costs money. Unless you live in an area where feed is very cheap, or grow your own feed, this isn't going to be economically viable. Having said that, some people enjoy keeping chickens as pets, and in that case economic viability takes a back seat. Plus there's a certain psychological satisfaction akin to tending to your own (also not economically viable) garden, which should not be underestimated. When I had a garden my every morning started with tending to it, and that was basically the most psychologically enjoyable thing I'd done in the last 30 years, especially when there's something to harvest. Plus, when AI neo-feudalism takes over, I won't starve. :-)
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death. If all meat was produced…
You're a reasonable / pragmatic vegan. Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans. There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know). I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for h…
I think I and most vegans also wouldn't eat it. It has nothing to do with rudeness or even the specific ethics of that situation or something. Just I wouldn't be able to physically stomach it. I would feel guilty but I wouldn't be able to eat it.